Lighter food for lighter, brighter days

Fresh and light and satisfying

With the improving weather – thank goodness we’re actually having a spring this year! – comes the desire to eat differently; lighter.

And it’s also the perfect time to try a few new things.

There have even been days, with real sun streaming down, when it was the perfect opportunity to pull out the salad spinner and rinse off some organic lettuce and winter purslane, and serve a huge plate of both, drizzled with virgin oil and a thinner balsamico, and topped with cheese.

Blue cheese suits such a dish perfectly, but in La Bouche earlier recently, I’d tried one that was new to me.

Beenliegh is an unpressed, soft blue from Devon, made from organic, unpasturised ewe’s milk. It’s creamy and moist, and beautifully fresh and subtle.

Get the right ingredients sourced and food doesn’t have to be complex to be very good.

A number of evenings recently have seen a dinner that was, if not a direct recreation, then was certainly inspired by a Jamie Oliver salmon dish that I’ve recently discovered.

He takes halved waxy potatoes and quartered fennel bulbs and boils them for six minutes, before draining and drying over the steam.

Salmon with fennel, sweet potato and herbs

Then they go in an oven-proof dish with olive oil, parsley, mint and garlic for something like half an hour, before the salmon – with more of the herby-garlicky mix on it – is placed on top and it goes back in the oven for a further 15 minutes.

It’s a lovely, easy dish, but I think a couple of tweaks help.

Set your oven to 180˚C (fan) and prep the fennel as above, not cutting off the base so that the pieces hold together. Retain the fronds.

Finely chop your mint, flat leaf parsley and garlic, and mix with plenty of olive oil.

Jamie’s version sprinkles the herbs and garlic over everything and then tops with oil, but I think that my way does two things: allows you to coat the ingredients more thoroughly and also reduces the chances of the garlic getting a tad burned.

So, pop in your fennel pieces and mix, and then add some sweet potato that has been peeled and cut into large chunks, instead of potato.

Gently stir around to coat everything. Season with good quality celery salt (my addition) and pop in the oven.

Lovely wild garlic

After 30 minutes, place your salmon fillets on top of the vegetables, scooping some of the oily, herby, garlicky mix on to the top.

And back it all goes for another 15-20 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish.

Serve with a good squeeze of fresh lemon juice and some black pepper, and topped with the chopped fennel fronds.

The advantage of swapping the potato for sweet potato is that the latter is a vegetable rather than a starchy carb, so it makes the dish a two-portion one rather than having just a single portion.

Mind, if you use lashing of garlic and herbs, those add up too.

Anyway, it’s easy. And tasty – and healthy.

A couple of stalls on Broadway Market also had wild garlic last week, so I grabbed a good handful of that while the opportunity was there.

The English asparagus is here

Later, the leaves were shredded and blitzed together with some spring onions, chives, garlic, pine nuts, a little salt and a teaspoon of sugar, with enough olive oil to give you a good pesto consistency.

You could add parmesan, but I don’t, since The Other Half doesn’t like cheese.

And an ideal way to use some of this lovely stuff – which keeps well in the fridge in a jar – is to cook some pasta, drain and return to the pan, adding some of the pesto with a little double cream and re-warming gently.

You won’t need to use a lot of the pesto – it packs a serious punch.

Serve with fresh asparagus and peas and plenty of freshly-ground black pepper, and if you want, more parmesan.

A perfect, fresh and seasonal dish for a midweek supper.

And on a final note – and a slightly different one: this is worth reading about the cost of asparagus from Peru.

Ignore the slightly puritanical tone of  “lust for this luxury vegetable” etc, but the point remains that there are severe environmental issues created by a global market for a cheap, seasonal vegetable, sent half way around the world to fill – or create – consumer demand outside our own season.

The new butcher of Broadway Market

A brand new butcher

Broadway Market has seen a change or two over recent weeks. Henry Tidiman’s has finally closed after a year of seeing reduced hours.

Hopefully, Henry can now enjoy a long and relaxing retirement.

But just as I was lamenting the loss of a butcher on the street – the premises will, from what I’ve heard, be turned into another eatery of some variety – something unexpected happened.

Another butcher opened, on almost the opposite side of the street.

The shop has been through various incarnations since the street started to revive, but it had, many, many years ago, been a butcher.

It’s quite possible that it had even been the shop that Henry’s father had run, giving us a rather pleasing sense of synchronicity.

Anyway, Hill & Szrok, master butcher, is now with us – and most welcome.

By day, it is a traditional butcher – very traditional, as the design reveals. Tom Richardson Hill is most certainly a butcher who combines a serious commitment to traditional butchery with an understanding of what a modern clientele in an area such as ours needs.

In the evening, an hour after closing, Alex Szrok takes over and operates it as a cookshop, taking a fresh look at that aspect of our culinary heritage.

There are a couple of important things worth noting. The shop will open to 6pm – pretty much essential these days for any new, independent food outlet that wants to catch people on their way home from work and offer a real alternative to supermarkets.

It helps to allow a Paris-style of shopping for food: being able to buy fresh, from independents, after work.

Since Broadway Market now has a fishmonger with a similar approach – Fin & Founder – and two organic greengrocers that open late (plus a range of very good Turkish general grocers) and La Bouche, which doesn’t close early, I can travel home and still shop for that evening’s meal.

The next thing to note is that Hill & Szrok is an organic butcher.

Forget the plastic

The area has changed – it doesn’t matter if some think that’s good and some think it’s bad – but it’s simply a fact that we’ve become the next stop on the eastwards-moving trendification of London’s East End.

That causes issues – not least in terms of the prices of housing in the area – but also in terms of prices on Broadway Market.

However, it’s also important to be realistic.

Broadway Market was all but dead little more than a decade ago.

The myriad shops that Henry described to me had, apart from his own, been consigned to history – in part because local people had decided that shopping at a big box Tesco was what they wanted.

Anything opening now has to ride the wave of the revival of interest in food.

However it’s characterised by some, that isn’t just ‘foodieism’, but reflects a number of trends – particularly among more middle-class people who can afford not to have to shop as cheaply as possible.

Lovely burgers

Last year’s horse meat farce is one such reason – people care increasingly about provenance for a very good reason. They’re also increasingly concerned about GM, about the use of antibiotics and hormones in their meat, about the sustainability of fish and about seasonality.

What’s happening on Broadway Market merely reflects that.

There is, as I’ve mentioned previously and touched on a few paragraphs ago, a question of money.

The UK has long seen households spend a lower percentage of their income on food than households on the Continent. And in the last few years, that gap has widened further.

While there are myriad issues with a wide cultural attitude of seeing food as fuel, and nursing a deep-seated suspicion of anyone who spends ‘too much’ time and money on it, it remains almost certainly the case that the recent further decline is down to stagnating and declining wages.

We know that incomes for everyone apart from those at the very top have fallen steadily for the last 30-odd years, while the cost of living has risen – not least in areas that are not even counted for the sake of inflation figures, such as housing and domestic fuel bills.

This is what I call a butcher

But since the 2008 crash – and even more so since 2010 – that decline has increased for many. The rise of foodbanks is an indicator of that.

And when many of our fellow citizens are having to make choices about whether to pay the gas bill or to cut back on what they spend on food, then this is not the best time to finger wag about how they should all eat better.

Mind, even with all the ‘added value’ at Hill & Szrok, it’s not as pricy as I expected.

But let’s go back to our new butcher: we’ve had a few things from there now – I admit to an almost giddy delight in being handed a package that is not bagged in plastic with a sticky red tie at the top, but wrapped carefully in proper paper, tied neatly and then handed to me in a simple paper bag.

When you walk in, there’s usually some serious butchery going on in the centre of the shop, often involving some huge pieces of meat – Tom also ages his own beef. This is the antithesis of the supermarket, with its pristinely-packed cuts sweating under plastic.

Beautiful pork

And Tom does not believe in all the nonsense about low fat being vital for continued good health either.

Oh my goodness – proper layers of creamy fat on meat, the like of which you suspected you’d never again see in a UK butcher.

A week ago, it was time for a piece of pork. I don’t often cook pork, because I’m terrified of that entire business of drying it out too much, but this was far too tempting.

It was a 2kg piece of boned, rolled leg – not done as a perfect tube, but, Tom explained to me, more like a bloomer in shape, because there are three types of muscle in that cut and, unless you butcher it the way he does, it will not cook evenly.

So, the oven was heated to its maximum and the meat brought out of the fridge to come to room temperature before having good salt rubbed into the scored skin.

It was given 20 minutes at the high temperature and then 20 minutes per 450g at 160˚C (fan), before being rested for 15 minutes.

Real gravy, reheating. Eat your heart out, Knorr

Gravy was made not from some pre-bought pot, but by first sweating shallot, carrot and celery, then adding dry cider and chopped apple, and simmering gently to reduce.

When the meat came out of the oven, the roasting dish was deglazed with that cidery mix, before having the fat separated off (my Lidl fat separator has proved a great bargain) and decanted into a small, copper pan, where it was reheated and then thickened carefully with beurre manié. Good enough to keep what was left over and reheat during the week.

Indeed, the pork did us a number of meals: how old-fashioned – buying a joint for the weekend and having plenty left for the days that follow.

And the pork itself was wonderful.

A wonderful leg of lamb

We’ve also had some of Tom’s burgers. Dense and lightly spiced, they produce actual blood when grilled – in other words, these are the real deal.

And a piece of boned, rolled lamb was excellent too.

This Easter weekend, being a traditionalist, it was back there for a leg of lamb. Longwood has had so little fat on its lamb in recent weeks I wanted to make sure I got some with a decent coat.

It was 2.1kg, so was started at 190˚C (fan) for half an hour, before being given a further 30 minutes per 450g. So three hours in total, give or take a minute or so, and followed with 15 minutes resting.

Served with English asparagus and the first Jersey Royals of the year – you know winter is really behind us when these appear – with a lovely jus from the meat juices, it was an absolute, melt-in-the-mouth joy.

Broadway Market has a new butcher – and it is most welcome. 

Wow – someone's discussing food security

Owen Paterson has, rather charmingly, suggested that it would be a really good thing if people bought more British-produced food.

Now it’s not often that I find myself in agreement with the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – a man who infamously stated that badgers “moved the goalposts” – but on this matter I am.

Although what he’s asking is rather more difficult than Paterson bimself might realise, for a number of reasons – not least among them, cost.

At a time when increasing numbers of British households are finding it difficult to make ends meet, food is often one area where people feel that they can buy cheaper.

It’s nearly a year ago that the horsemeat scandal broke and one of the points that emerged with some clarity was that the cheaper the meat product, the more likely it was to have been adulterated with something that was never listed on any label.

The consumer needs cheep food and, in order to continue to make profits, the company needs to cut costs as well as the price. Given that there were extensive chains of companies involved in the production of these products – all of whom needed to turn a profit – it can hardly be much of a surprise that someone in that chain decided to cheat.

In early autumn 2012, I spent a day with trading standards in Northamptonshire.

This was an area where the (Conservative) council valued the service provided and was trying to protect it against cuts, but it had already been reduced to a point where much work was being done by phone instead of visits – the logistics of a semi-rural county made many visits too time-consuming.

I was shown around the store of contraband merchandise that had been intercepted and impounded. There was no shortage of tobacco – mostly produced, it was explained to me, in China, and containing … well, just about anything, including floor sweepings.

There’s not a world of difference between that and the horsemeat fiasco.

The level of tax on legal goods such as tobacco is an issue – not least for those on low incomes.

But in the case of fresh food, tax should not have an impact.

There is a culture in the UK of believing that food should be cheap. How anyone expects quality to come at the least possible cost is an interesting question – food viewed simply as fuel, again –  but increasing poverty means that increasing numbers of people have little realistic choice in the matter.

There are also plenty of cases of people who need convenience food because they have no facilities to cook – and of those visiting foodbanks for help who can’t afford the money to fuel a cooker.

In none of these cases is it remotely an option to tell people to ‘buy British’, unless you’re going to be able to guarantee that the Brit option is the cheapest and most readily available.

Then there’s the rise of supermarkets – to the point where they now have 80% plus of the UK grocery retail trade – which is also part of the problem.

The knowledgeable butcher who would supply cheap cuts as well as prime ones, the corner shops and the independent general stores that would stock local produce have, if not entirely disappeared, been hammered into endangered species status.

Many people have also lost the skills required to cook from scratch and therefore the chance to control more of what they eat – and then there’s the related attitude toward shopping; that it’s best avoided as much as possible excepting the once-a-week stock up at some tin box you need a car to visit.

Add to that the damage that has been done to UK farmers and producers by the same supermarket behemoths slashing prices and forcing the cost of those cuts on to farmers and producers.

Joanna Blythman has written much on the subject. If you choose just one of her books to read, then pick Shopped: The shocking power of Britain’s supermarkets.

As I’ve illustrated a few times on here, supermarkets are not as cheap as they might seem – and this is particularly true when it comes to processed foods and ready meals.

Another related problem is the cultural shift in the UK away from seasonality. Both as individual and commercial customers, many Britons now expect strawberries and asparagus in December, for instance.

And the supermarkets, with their global reach and massive financial clout, are only too happy to oblige.

So we have a world in which asparagus sprouts in Peru, where it is draining the water supplies of local communities, and where carnations are grown in Africa and flown to places where people will die without a water-guzzling bloom grown out of its natural season and habitat.

Quinoa, that most hip of foods, grows only in the Andean nations, but export is forcing up the price of what is a staple crop for local people. The export price had risen from $0.80 per kg in 1970 to $3.029 per kg in 2011, according to the UN.

And the UN designated 2013 as International Year of Quinoa in recognition of the Andean peoples that have grown the crop in the past and the present, through “knowledge and practices of living in harmony with nature”, and as an attempt to draw attention to food security issues.

Blythman also puts the sword to the wishy-washy idea that non-indigenous foods grown in the developing world for export is massively good for people in those parts of the world and therefore A Nice Thing.

No – you don’t get to justify munching Peruvian asparagus in January with any such patronising twaddle.

There are things we can’t grow in the UK – cocoa, coffee, lemons for instance. But in the case of the first two, they don’t need to be flown around the world as soon as possible after harvest. And lemons can be imported from our own home continent.

But much of what we import is in order to maintain all-year-round availability of seasonal produce.

On food security, it was also only last year that the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) warned that Britain produces less than two-thirds (62%) of the food that the country consumes, down from 75% in 1991. It called on the government, public and food industry to help.

Perhaps Paterson’s comments are that help?

A couple of years before the last general election, David Cameron told the NFU conference that any future Tory government would help farmers – by advising them on how to set up co-ops.

I don’t know whether this has been forthcoming, but this does seem to be one industry that – badger culling aside – the government is not realistically interested in helping, which is move away from traditional Conservative policy anyway.

Which point leads us to another interesting issue.

One cannot help but wonder how increased farming is going to be affected by the planned opening up much of the British Isles to fracking.

Surveys have shown, for instance, that much of east Lancashire is sitting on huge reserves of underground gas. It’s also farming country, and fracking has form when it comes to problems.

In just the last few days, four states in the US have confirmed water pollution from oil or gas drilling, while increased radiation has also been found in water and blamed on fracking.

This is in direct opposition to the claims of industry and some politicians that there are no dangers and problems hardly ever happen.

Story

Story

Fracking in the Ribble Valley seems like rather risky business – for the environment and for domestic food production. And obviously east Lancashire is not the only area that could be affected.

It’s hardly the actions of a government that is being friendly or helpful to its traditional allies in the rural communities.

So while it’s good to see people actually acknowledging that food security is important and needs tackling, however nice the sentiment, simply asking people to ‘buy British’ is not going to change a single thing – and most certainly not while the issue of low and lowering incomes, and the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ are such major problems for so many.

Marketing at its brightest – the charity edition

It's charidee!

I have a brand new idea for a really ace marketing campaign. How about: ‘buy our product – or the poor black child in Africa gets it’?

You like it? No?

Well it’s already happening, in essence, because it’s the subliminal message that could be taken from a number of advertising campaigns by a number of companies, which attempt to persuade you to buy their products by promising to make a small donation to charity for every unit sold.

At present in the UK, we have Kelloggs promoting itself by promising that if you promote the company, they’ll ensure that a child somewhere in the UK will get a breakfast.

@KelloggsUK has been tweeting: “RT to #GiveAChildABreakfast. Breakfast clubs are fun and help kids get their breakfast so they can focus in class”.

Now to be fair, I tweeted back at them, rather snidely suggesting that that breakfast would be sugar-laden and salt-packed breakfast cereals. They responded, saying that they give money to school breakfast clubs, with no conditions on how it is spent.

However, the core issue remains: it’s an act of marketing disguised as charity.

Only this lunchtime in a corner shop, I noticed boxes of Whiskas cat food proclaiming that if you buy those, it’ll help to “protect the tiger”.

Pampers Nappies seem to regularly advertise by saying that if you buy their nappies they’ll donate something or other – for instance, one tetanus jab to UNICEF for each packet front returned to them.

And right now, Innocent Drinks is selling bottles of their smoothies with miniature hats on top that have been knitted and sent in by members of the public, and from the sales of which the company will donate to Age UK to keep old people from freezing to death this winter.

You can see below the Twitter conversation I had with them about this yesterday.

This is a company, remember, that is 90% owned by Coca-Cola, which itself hardly has a sparkling record, facing longstanding criticisms on a range of issues from its environmental record to the abduction and murder of trade unionists at its bottling plants in Guatemala and Colombia.

So what happens if you don’t buy the product that promises to make a donation?

Remember the social media meme: ‘If God sees you masturbating, a kitten will die’? That’s a joke about blackmail.

These are rather less jokey.

What it certainly does is to philosophically change the nature of charity.

If charitable giving is about increasing sales/profits or being able to get a tax break, it alters the essential nature of the act.

If you doubt me on the tax-break point, ask yourself how you'd feel if you discovered that someone had claimed tax back on the cost of a poppy for this season of remembrance.

And if that is not the exploitation of those in need for the sake of profit, then what is it?

If nothing else, there’s a corporate cynicism here that is not in keeping with what one would hope charity would mean.

It’s even got a name – ‘cause marketing’, and in the US at least, there’s a web page from the New York State Office of the Attorney General about it, advising both companies and customers on the issue.

According to Wikipedia, “Cause-related marketing is a powerful marketing tool that business and nonprofit organizations are increasingly leveraging. According to the Cone Millennial Cause Study in 2006, 89% of Americans (aged 13 to 25) would switch from one brand to another brand of a comparable product (and price) if the latter brand was associated with “good cause” ... Earlier studies by Cone indicate an upward trend in the number of Americans who associate their own buying habits with cause marketing as well as an expectation that those companies to be “good corporate citizens”.”

So it works to increase sales.

It works in a different way too.

The American Heart Foundation gives out a stamp of approval via its food certification programme, which permits the use of its ‘heart check’ logo on products that meet its low-fat, low-cholesterol standards, such as Cheerios, the breakfast cereal.

We have something similar in the UK, where the British Heart Foundation has links with Flora, a brand that is owned by Unilever, which is also involved in the UK government’s public health policy-making process.

Innocent Drinks get antsy

But let’s hop back to those Cheerios for a moment. Ingredients – “Whole Cereal Grains (77.8%) (Whole Grain Oats, Whole Grain Wheat, Whole Grain Barley, Whole Grain Rice, Whole Grain Maize), Sugar, Partially Inverted Brown Sugar Syrup, Wheat Starch, Salt, Tripotassium Phosphate, Colours: Carotene, Annatto And Caramel, Antioxidant: Tocopherols, Vitamins And Minerals: Vitamin C, Niacin, Pantothenic Acid, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (B2), Thiamin (B1), Folic Acid (Folacin), Vitamin B12, Calcium Carbonate And Iron, To produce 100g Of This Product 77.8g Of Whole Grain Was Included In This Recipe”.

Yay! Low fat! Yay! Actually, 3.2g of fat per 45g serving, of which 1.5g saturates. However, the same serving also includes 28.7g of carbohydrate, 12.4g of which sugars.

Now take a look at Flora Original Spread (they’ve stopped calling it margarine after that became box office poison), which is part of a brand that is sometimes marketed as linked to the British Heart Foundation.

Ingredients: “Vegetable Oils (Seed Oils 85%), Water, Salt (1.4%), Buttermilk, Emulsifier: Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Preservative: Potassium Sorbate, Citric Acid, Vitamin E, Vitamin B6, Flavouring, Colour: Beta-Carotene, Folic Acid, Vitamins A, D and B12.”

Now, what do you think the ingredients list looks like on a pack of unsalted butter?

You won’t easily find any such list – because there’s only one ingredient in unsalted butter, and that’s cream.

Then ask yourself why butter doesn’t need added “flavouring” and why Flora Original ‘Spread’ does. And why it needs colour added too. Could it be because you wouldn’t want to spread it on anything if these things were not added? And if it would taste dire of or nothing, and if it looked awful without added colour, why would anyone think it a ‘natural’ and healthy food to consume and why would anyone buy and consume – it?

Of course, conventional advice is that fat is bad for you – so buy those foods that call themselves low-fat, even if they’re stuffed with sugars to compensate for the lack of taste and ‘mouth feel’ that occurs when fat is stripped out.

This orthodoxy is, however, being challenged.

Dr Aseem Malhotra, an interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University Hospital, London, recently made the headlines after penning a shocking (to many) article in the British Medical Journal, which said, briefly, that saturated fat is not the problem – and may actually be good for your health. And that the real problems are caused by sugars.

To emphasise: that’s a non-technical summary, so please do read the original article, which you can access here.

Dr Malhotra is not the first to point this out, but he has enough of a profile to ensure that the story was picked up widely.

The British Heart Foundation continues to reject such conclusions, but its relationship with Flora/Unilever means that, at best, it has a conflict of interest. The same is the case in the States with the American Heart Foundation.

And this is at a time when there is an increasingly loud voice saying that sugars – many of them hidden – are the major dietary health problem in the West, and that this is what needs to be tackled.

As has been said by others, the attitude of Big Food to this is reminiscent of the behavior of tobacco companies – and its difficult to see cause marketing as not being an entirely deliberate and calculated tactic in creating an image of corporate responsibility and moral behavior that enables to multinational companies to continue behaving just as they please, while customers, trying to do the right thing, make choices based on that cynical marketing.

As Jim Royle might so eloquently put it:  ‘Charity my arse’ .

• You can follow @DrAseemMalhotra on Twitter for more information on diet.